Vita Sackville-West(1892 — 1962)
Vita Sackville-West
Royaume-Uni
9 min read
A British writer and poet of the 20th century, Vita Sackville-West is known for her novels, her poetry, and her gardens. She was the close friend of Virginia Woolf, who drew inspiration from her for the novel Orlando.
Key Facts
- Born on 9 March 1892 at Knole, Kent, into an aristocratic English family
- Published the long poem The Land in 1926, which earned her the Hawthornden Prize
- Close friend and inspiration of Virginia Woolf, who published Orlando in 1928 as a tribute to her
- Created the famous garden at Sissinghurst Castle with her husband Harold Nicolson from 1930 onwards
- Died on 2 June 1962 at Sissinghurst, Kent
Works & Achievements
A long lyric poem celebrating the seasons and agricultural life of Kent, written in the English georgic tradition. It won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and established Vita's reputation as one of the greatest British poets of her time.
A travel account of Persia during Harold Nicolson's diplomatic missions. Vita describes with sensitivity and wit an Orient she is encountering for the first time, weaving cultural observation together with personal introspection.
An autobiographical novel depicting life among the English aristocracy in the early twentieth century, seen through the eyes of a young heir in a country house reminiscent of Knole. An immediate bestseller, it sold more than 30,000 copies within a few weeks of publication.
Her most celebrated novel: an eighty-eight-year-old widow finally chooses to live for herself after a lifetime of sacrifice to social convention. Regarded as an early feminist plea, it remains her most widely read work of fiction.
A masterful horticultural creation designed with Harold Nicolson, laid out as a series of themed "rooms," including the famous White Garden planted entirely in white. Considered one of the most influential gardens of the twentieth century in England.
For fifteen years, Vita contributed a weekly gardening column to this major London newspaper. Collected into anthologies, these pieces remain a touchstone for British gardeners and are a testament to her botanical learning.
Anecdotes
Vita Sackville-West was Virginia Woolf's great love; in 1928, Woolf dedicated to her the novel *Orlando*, a whimsical tale of an aristocrat who travels through the centuries while changing sex. The novel is considered one of the most original love declarations in English literature. Woolf herself described it as a “biographical fantasy” made possible by Vita’s extraordinary personality.
Vita was the designated heir to Knole, the vast family manor in Kent with 365 rooms. But English law at the time prevented a woman from inheriting such a property; when her father died in 1928, the estate passed to a male cousin. This injustice haunted her all her life and inspired several of her works, including her intimate memoirs.
In 1930, Vita and her husband Harold Nicolson bought the crumbling ruins of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent for the sum of £12,375. What she created on that ravaged land became one of the most celebrated gardens in the world, now managed by the National Trust and visited by more than 200,000 people each year.
Every morning, Vita would write in a medieval tower set apart from the rest of Sissinghurst Castle, reached by a spiral staircase. There she wrote her novels, poems, and articles, taking care not to be disturbed. This tower has become a living symbol of the room “of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf called for to allow women to create freely.
Vita’s marriage to the diplomat Harold Nicolson rested on a tacit agreement of mutual freedom: each maintained relationships with people of the same sex, while preserving a deep friendship and intellectual companionship. Their son Nigel Nicolson revealed this truth in *Portrait of a Marriage* (1973), a book assembled from his mother’s own memoirs, provoking a mixture of scandal and admiration.
Primary Sources
“You have the quality I admire above all others: you are whole. Never divided, never hesitating — you are Vita, and that is enough to explain everything.”
“I am a creature of contradictions: I love solitude and company, the countryside and the city, men and women. That is what I am, and I no longer seek to apologise for it.”
“It is an ancient bond, that of man with the earth, stretching back to the first ploughings, when the gods were not yet forgotten and the seasons commanded life entirely.”
“The garden is the only place where time truly stands still: one plants for ten years hence, waters for tomorrow, and tends for today.”
“Our marriage withstood everything, not because it was ordinary, but precisely because it was not. We chose freedom and truth over convention.”
Key Places
An immense Tudor manor of 365 rooms where Vita was born and grew up. She was excluded from it upon her father's death due to her sex, an injustice that profoundly shaped her work and her relationship with identity and inequality.
Medieval ruins purchased in 1930 by Vita and Harold Nicolson and transformed into one of England's most celebrated gardens. The medieval tower served as Vita's writing study until her death and remains her most iconic home.
The London neighbourhood where the Bloomsbury Group gathered — the intellectual circle that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster. Vita regularly visited her writer friends there and forged her close relationship with Woolf.
Vita and Harold's first home after their marriage, where they lived from 1915 to 1930 and created their first garden before moving to Sissinghurst. It was here that her lifelong passion for horticulture began.
Vita accompanied Harold on his diplomatic postings to Persia in the 1920s, an experience that inspired her travel memoir *Passenger to Teheran* (1926) and broadened her worldview well beyond the confines of the English aristocracy.